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Quick Review – Nothing is Strange

Author Mike Russell puts together a collection of surrealist fiction stories in. Each one with a vague dream-like (or nightmare, depending on your perspective) quality to it. The title of this anthology might be Nothing is Strange, but that is far from accurate. Everything in this collection has a sense of oddity or absurdity about it, but when that becomes the norm, maybe we truly can come to the ultimate conclusion that indeed, nothing is strange.

To be perfectly honest, many of these stories went completely over my head. I didn’t “get” what the author was driving at in telling them. There may very well be some vast, deeper meaning to all of it, but unfortunately it was lost on me. However, that isn’t equivalent to the works not being well constructed. Quite the opposite actually. The overwhelming majority of the stories here are very well-written, to the point where even though I wasn’t necessarily understanding the underlying meaning, I still enjoyed reading them, and was never hesitant about being ready to start the next one. Which brings me to my final point. Most of the tales here are short, which helps in the desire to want to keep reading after you finish one. It also helps in the desire to finish the one you’re currently reading. Had these strange and surreal stories been dozens of pages long, it would have made it that much more difficult to work my way through them, but taken in small portions like this, they’re actually very manageable.

In short, if you’re in the mood for something different, VERY different, give this anthology a shot. At the very least, it’s a pretty solid example of good writing and plot construction, even if it doesn’t always make the most sense.